"Webbiquity" is about being everywhere online when and where buyers are looking for what you sell. It's what I help B2B clients achieve through a coordinated strategy of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing, and influencer relations, supported by the right marketing technology.

Funny Business: The Best Digital Marketing Humor, 2013 Edition

One of the greatest aspects of being a marketer is that, in most professions, sitting around the office thinking up bad puns, penning snarky double entendres, or storyboarding cat videos would be considered goofing off. In marketing, that’s called “work.”

There are three kinds of marketing data analysts: those who can count and those who can’t. If a book about failures doesn’t sell, is it a success? I once saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

Yes, the marketing profession can be a challenging and frustrating one: unrealistic expectations, dizzying change, crazy demands on time—and that’s before heading to the office.

So, grab a cup of coffee (or glass of wine, depending on what time of day you’re reading this), sit back for a few minutes, and enjoy some of the funniest, oddest and/or most creative posts, videos, lists and infographics of the past year.

Bethany Simpson writes “Whether you’re a runner, a designer, or a marine biologist, you finally have the chance to tell the world you’ve been misunderstood for too long. Thanks to the ‘What I really do’ meme, everyone gets a voice! We’ve listed some of our favorites.”

Christine Erickson shares a compilation of some of the dumbest placements and uses of QR codes, such as across subway tracks (or great placement–if you are trying to actually kill your target customers), in subway cars (for products you wouldn’t be caught dead scanning), on billboards, and more.

It’s unclear whether or not these are still available, but Diana Adams highlights custom Nike sneaker designs from Daniel Reese that range from Twitter and Pac Man to Super Mario and Flash (the superhero, not the software).

Not so much funny as surprising (and even educational), this post explains how six, well, as the title says, “iconic things” had their origins in PR. One (perhaps) surprising example: the Guinness Book of World Records was invented by the beer company to sell in bars, so that patrons would have an “official book of records that could be used to settle bar bets.”

We all know that stock photos are what designers turn to when they need to put SOME kind of photographic image on a page, that reflects some idea, but don’t have access to any real photography from the client. Many have been overused (the business meeting including the white-haired guy with glasses, the attractive brunette with the telephone headset that just screams “customer service!,” etc.). This site, however, showcases stock photos that…no one is quite sure of the intended purpose for.

In a twist on the dictionary concept above, Jeff Einstein riffs on 21st-century euphemisms, such as artificial intelligence: “AI is where we currently deposit all of our hopes for a better future through digital technology — largely because we have no faith in our own intelligence anymore (for obvious reasons).”

The inimitable Dino Dogan observes that some people are good at visualization, and some are good at link baiting, and that when it comes to infographics, the two groups don’t like each other much. After being trashed by a visual purist, here is the infographic on how to produce infographics that resulted “one lousy link-baiter/infographic-maker decided to strike back, with vengeance.”

Noting that the concept of a Facebbok phone “looks to be a derivative product developed a few years too late into a market that it can’t differentiate in,” the prolific Jim Dougherty suggests a handful of enhancements that could nevertheless turn this product into a winner, among them: “Game thwart. In response to any Zynga game request, with Facebook phone you can pay to ruin that person’s social game. Dispatch a small Army of gophers into anyone’s Farmville or get the word out in Mafia Wars that your friend is a snitch. The best feature is that you don’t even have to understand the game to do this. Just pay Zynga through Facebook’s PayPal analog FacePal and they will take care of it for you.”

Why do ads for “a seemingly random assortment of merchants – Bloomingdales, BMW of Sudbury, ankylosing spondylitis treatments, whip cream chargers” show up on Bing for a search on the term “keyword”? Elisa Gabbert gets to the bottom of it.

Stacey Kole showcases more than three dozen print ads that will make you alternatingly cringe, chuckle, scratch your head, admire the art director’s creativity, wonder why the art director hasn’t yet been confined to an institution, and express other emotions.

Ken Mueller displays the humorous result of scraping and auto-rewording (Ken surmises “it must have been run through some sort of program that looks for synonyms, and then replaces a lot of the words, while supposedly keeping the intent and context”) gone horribly wrong. Hey, at least the original backlinks were left intact.

As the post notes, “a presenter at the TED conference has his talk interrupted by the Mac spinning wait cursor” that slips its digital bounds, and, well…the results are fun–and the look on the presenter’s face is priceless.

Josh Dreller pokes fun at 17 real by ridiculous job titles, including Wizard of Light Bulb Moments (“How many HR directors does it take to fire a ‘Wizard of Light Bulb Moments’?”), Social Media Badass (really, is your mom proud to tell her friends that?) and Direct Mail Demi-God (“I would think an omnipotent, all-knowing being would have had the sense to get out of traditional media by now”).